Daily News Spin — February 22, 2001 (Thursday)

EA.com grabs your wallet and won't let go

In an article at MCV, EA.com has revealed their eventual pricing plan and their desire to be the "HBO" of online networks.

EA.com went live in October, with 30 online games plus 25 matching services for packaged PC products. By the end of December it had signed up more than 6m unique users, compared with 1.2m unique users across all EA Web sites before the dotcom�s launch. The site also has more than 1.2m registered members, and is growing at 10,000 per day, CEO Larry Probst said. By the end of the calendar year, EA intends to offer $9.99 subscriptions to two channels: EA Sports Arena and EA Worlds, plus some kind of discount structure for people who subscribe to both services. Initially, however, Sports will feature three games for $4.99 (growing to seven for $9.99), while Worlds and Sports will be offered combined for $9.99.

This is a reaction to a nine-month user churn they experience with Ultima Online. Players activate an account and play for nine months and then cancel, according to EA's data. They don't want to lose those accounts, so they're planning on bundling online games together. If you get tired of one, you'll be reluctant to cancel your account because there will be other games you want to play. It's diabolical!

The article also mentions some new subscription-only games that are coming:

Among the new titles are three subscription-based games for the EA Sports Arena: Nascar, Tiger Woods Golf and Knockout Kings, which will be bundled as a subscription package. Other titles include Silent Death and Air Warrior 3 in the Worlds section of the site.

And of course there's Majestic and The Sims Online and another rumored big launch, which may be a Harry Potter or even a Lord of the Rings game, according to the article.

3DO to skip E3

3DO has decided to not attend E3 this year, according to a story at MCV:

Amid financial woes and a recent staff reduction of about 10%, 3DO has decided to forgo E3 this year, believing it can get better bang for its buck in more intimate one-on-one meetings with the media, institutional investors and retail buyers.

This is surprising news. The article does mention that 3DO is thinking about getting an off-site location to show their games. Gathering of Developers has done this for the past couple of shows, renting a parking lot across the street from the convention center.

King of Dragon Pass dissected

IDevGames has a post-mortem of the indie game King of Dragon Pass written by one of the game's creators, David Dunham (see our interview):

One problem that we became aware of as the project progressed was that of emergent behavior: it is easy enough to test one scene of the game but hard to know how they all fit together until you can actually play many game years. Unfortunately, we weren't able to do this until late in the project and had to go back and make changes. The development cycle took three long years. This is far too long in today's commercial game industry.

American McGee dissected

Amer discusses Alice in a quick vivesection of the game at TechTV. We didn't realize just how radical a game Alice is.

Gameplay in action-adventure games usually revolves around basic jumping, puzzle solving, fighting, and exploring. To this we added swinging, bouncing, riding, floating, and shrinking.

Swinging? Of course! Riding? We are not worthy! He is a genius!

Bill Roper interview

Our interview with Blizzard's Bill Roper is now up. Bill talks about Warcraft 3, the Diablo 2 expansion, the new Warcraft novel, and a few other things. Here's the link.

3am

The big buzz is the video of the new Doom game in action at the Tokyo MacWorld Expo. Of course it was displayed using the new $600.00 NVIDIA GeForce III card, which dampens our enthusiasm a bit. That's the likely cost of a combined PS2 and Xbox purchase, just for a videocard. We'll wait until it's under $200.

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